skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But Apple isn't a person and anthropomorphizing a corporation is pointless. Companies don't act with the same motivations as people do, while there are some general principles that can be seen at work in both human colonies and corporates in the market, and while a process similar to evolution (where startups are the mutant DNA experiments) can be seen at work in moving the market, companies act in the interest of their shareholders. Even if the analogy were to hold, I don't think you've characterized Apple accurately.

The analogy of corporations/market place and human colonies is an interesting one that has ramifications through society all the way to the Supreme Court, but I think the flippant remark about Apple lacking empathy, or being fearless or lacking responsibility is rather like thinking a dolphin is smiling at you at sea world.
No, the expectation is that you'll use a loop or recursion. If you use an existing method/function, the interviewer will kindly ask you to implement that yourself.

The general reason why such a question is asked is because interviewers don't have an infinite amount of time and there's no point in considering any candidate who can't do this. It's a way to weed out ridiculously bad candidates so that you can focus more on good candidates.
Solving Nim, a mísere game
Yeah, the truth is the methods companies use to find their bugs currently won't be able to give a definitive "no" anyway. The answers are really "yes, you have bugs" or "maybe you have bugs but we can't find any", which is true no matter how you coded. Static analysis would be another tool just like peer review or unit tests. I wonder if you could bring it up that way...
In order to find all the words from a large collection that are within K distance of the searched word, you can use a trie:

http://blog.vjeux.com/2011/c/c-fuzzy-search-with-trie.html
But he didnt actually succeed in getting the desired result- the problem was that the statement of the problem was flawed. There obviously is a difference between what Goldstein meant, and what he said.
Dennis Ritchie passes away at 70 (2011)
Well, hands down, Apple has the coolest looking hardware; not sure you have to be a kool-aid drinker to appreciate it. But it's cool that Lenovo hasnt tried to imitate them like everyone else has. So in that way, maybe because they look a bit retro now, I'll say it, I think ThinkPads look awesome.
The problem is with your thinking of individuals as "a crowd" and expecting some sort of cohesiveness, as if the crowd and not the individual is the basic unit of intention and action.
Beautiful video. Well made, well executed, and showed how Jobs was a visionary for Apple and the brand. Love the minimalist presentation of the video, how the entire homepage is 'whited out' with just a simple video. Amazing experience, and made me remember some of my favorite Job quotes. Well done Apple.
What would be the irony in using SVG?
> "After two, or even one year, this device becomes too old in Google’s eyes and it refuses to make a newer Android version compatible for the gadget"

What? It's not Google but the carriers and the manufacturers who don't update. Google doesn't earn money (at least not much) from device sales. They make money from app sales and ads. So Google would benefit from updating the devices.

I haven't seen this site before but I'm definitely not going back if their writers are incompetent like that.
We miss you, Steve.
Yesterday's post was closer to the actuality of a programmer than this one. To reiterate what I said yesterday, when you are coding professionally, you don't choose what technologies to use, you don't pick projects that itch your creative side. You're just part of a production steam roll. Passion is irrelevant in this discussion. What matters is how fast you can deliver and whether you are more billable than the next guy.
The other parameter in this equation is Money. I am sure I can find a low stress dev job working on a project that I am actually interested in but at age 50 i don't want to be living on medium wage making ends meet. I'd rather work on a high stress job, while I am young, with a decent salary, giving it all I have and by 40 I'd have secured my future enough that I can do something else ... my two cents
You mean like you just did? I don't think that about e.g. Huxley at all. I think he was genuinely worried about his fellow man and wanted to make them aware.
I work in the same order as npsimons. It's a similar philosophy to the red-green-refactor strategy (http://bit.ly/OazqR8).

The advantage, to me, is that you focus on the behavior of the application rather than the code. I have a tendency to get off-track when I'm coding and I'll start on refactors that, in hindsight, were a terrible idea.

By forcing myself to be sure that the feature/bug is something I really want, I stay on-track because that damned test keeps failing and I just want to make it go green! By writing the test beforehand, I can be sure that it's what I really want and not just what's easy to code.

That said, both ways work and I sometimes switch to an approach like yours.
That's definitely a valid approach. Ideally in maturity you reach a state where you're always 100% honest with yourself and counseling can lead you there too. Many times both approaches are used.

There are lots of off-patent medications that don't cost a fortune and can make a huge difference in quality of life for people who need them.

Either way a statement like "I'd rather be a zombie than continue on as I do today," made in earnest, sounds like someone in need of help.
I used to get really irritated with whatever phone manufacturer I bought from was holding out on updates. However, we now have enough data to have a good idea of the tendencies with each carrier/manufacturer. For example, if you choose Verizon, you know you're going to be waiting a while. My next phone will not be with Verizon.

I definitely understand that some people only get decent service from one or two carriers in their area (and don't have as much as a choice), so this is probably more aimed at those who have a few options to choose from: I really do think it's time to vote with our feet.

If updates are a priority for you, pick a manufacturer and carrier that have a decent update record (if you have the choice). If you don't have a choice, complain publicly and loudly about your carrier's update practices, and maybe someone will hear one of us.
What is Your Opinion Really Worth?
Yeah, this. If it were just about the OS customization Google could release a PC/Mac tool which would flash the latest build of Android onto any phone with an unlocked bootloader (which is most of them these days). The user could choose to continue with the phone manufacture's default build or get the latest "pure" Android.

Where this idea falls apart quickly is drivers for custom hardware. There's just no way Google could take on the driver development for every phone (both because it is just too much work and also because lots of phones have proprietary drivers running against hardware that isn't publicly documented).
Twitter converts the string 'hashtag' in its URLs
I follow several 'hashtag related' accounts for the sake of my web app. Came across the user @hashtag https://twitter.com/hashtag

Tried to see their followers: https://twitter.com/hashtag/followers
redirects to https://twitter.com/i/#!/search/?q=%23followers

Clicked: https://twitter.com/hashtag/following
and got https://twitter.com/i/#!/search/?q=%23following

https://twitter.com/hashtag/lists worked as expected (huh?)

mobile.twitter.com URLs do not follow this behavior though

Is this a Twitter account?

(edited for grammar)
How much time to do you spend thinking about what needs to be done next?
This article might have been interesting had its author ever bothered to define the acronym "MOOC".
How to Sell Your Crappy Product Online
Did you just brainstorm the name efreeme or did you use another approach?
Sigh. Claude Shannon is rolling in his grave.
I heard more or less the same at a meetup last month, from a headhunter guy who wanted to convince a few of us there to go work for some company at below average market wages.

This argument comes along a lot among people who's actual complaint is that engineers are too expensive these days, despite the number of other less complex professions that are more well remunerated and have no shortage of manpower right now.
I lived from my car for 4 months in Silicon Valley while working on my startup. I got along just fine in a two door Honda Civic. I posted the details in an answer on Quora (even included a couple videos). http://www.quora.com/Would-becoming-homeless-be-a-good-strat...
Cool.

For those of you who would like a reference supporting this claim, check out the following: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10051225.

I often share stuff I read on HN with friends and it's useful to have evidence beyond "some dude on HN said so."
Send dialog is great, I've used and it's nice. The thing is what I'm talking about is allowing someone to perform a function and have somebody alerted to that function without another step.

So Send Dialog only allows them to decide to share something on the app. What I'm suggesting is the "post as" feature to also include "message as"
That's certainly one interface that can be removed: the doors in Star Trek don't have doorknobs.
swiping works fine on tablet chrome
The site will always be free, and we plan to make some money by allowing to order PCBs straight from the site.

Our biggest differentiator from upverter is that we allow to build electronics using pre-design circuit "modules" (which are also already routed as a sub-PCB) other people in the community. We believe this can drastically accelerate electronic design, up to a point where people with no electronics background can start designing circuits.

We also have PCB layout functionality from the start and plan to offer PCB ordering service very soon.
Personally, I'm gunning for Betelgeuse. That would be awesome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse#Approaching_supernov...
Chrome Extensions for Web Designers
Intel wants to micromanage tablet makers in the name of battery life
Cmon, man. Why should a businessman be respected any less than an engineer?
> Actually, you’d break even much sooner because your camper van is an asset. If you bought a used camper van from the 1980s, it’s unlikely to lose much more value under your watch. If you fix it up, it may even have appreciated in value when you look to sell it. If you resell it for anywhere near what you paid for it, you break even in just a couple of months. If you found a great deal on a van, you’d break even sooner. If you drove it around a lot and had high fuel costs, you might not.

Random, slightly OT thought: I never thought about buying used vehicles from this perspective. I've always thought of an auto as purely a liability.
In 2011.
Just in case you're confused, this article was published on October 13, 2011.
Amazing article. BUT...there are interfaces in all of the simple versions of the examples.

Key + keyhole = interface.

A keyhole that "knows" when the correct key is close = better interface.

Wallet + Money + cashier + cash register = interface.

If you could do NFC without an app & without a cashier, that would be even better.

There is no such thing as "no interface" if something is being accomplished.

Rock + coconut = interface.

Hand + mouse = interface.

Your eyes + my words = interface.
How Programmers Count Ships
I think the submitter is making the point that we seem to have forgotten about Ritchie but have managed to remember the one-year anniversary of Steve Jobs's death.
Entrepreneurship is 'weaker than ever'
Pre iPhone 5
Isn't light a synonym for visible light...?
Boy, if I could make it to 40 that would be a doozy. I do wonder if programming will be obsolete in a few decades and if the things we've programmed will start programming us. Well, I guess they already do in a way.
are we going to reduce AI to finding a conveniently-tuned input -> output function?

You have missed exactly what makes this new research exciting. This is unsupervised learning. That means there is no input->output function during most of the process.

The neural net is presented with piles of undifferentiated data (e.g. YouTube videos) and given no objective function; it decides for itself what the output should be based solely on the features of the input data. Then later we define an objective function (e.g. face detection) and we discover that the neural net has already learned how to compute this function. Furthermore, when we look at the behavior of the neurons in the lower layers, we find that they correspond remarkably closely to the measured behavior of neurons in the lower layers of our own visual cortex.
Which is the expected solution, assuming Microsoft doesn't try to prevent you from doing so as a result of your location.
Financial transactions tend to create a lot of data for the logging and recoverability they require, and the logging isn't terribly interesting.

The trick is realizing that things can and do fail in any way for any reason, and being able to automatically recover from any point in that process. Our (WePay's) system currently requires, at an absolute minimum, seven inserts across six tables, though more commonly 9-10 rows across seven, plus updates on several others, and significantly more if we can't authorize the payment on the first attempt (e.g., mistyped ZIP code on your billing address). Only one of those tables is for logging (account_history, which is functionally identical to a check ledger).

I've completely ignored both the logging of state changes (largely redundant at this point, it was more for early debugging a couple years ago, but still sometimes useful for figuring out why something stalled) and recording of fraud-detection data which can easily be a hundred rows, albeit very small ones (80 bytes or so). It's also interesting to look at what updates need to be performed in a transaction and which ones don't, although that's of course irrelevant to the actual amount of data produced.

That doesn't account for the product side of payments at all - recording contents of shopping carts, donations, ticket purchases, etc. That's at best one stateless row, but use your imagination about the data layout for various money-collecting tools.

Archival is interesting and something I'm sure we'll look at more in the future, but right now it would tend to create more problems than it solves -- we have automated data integrity checks running multiple times per day to ensure nothing is out of line, and kicking data out to an archive somewhere would complicate that significantly. We also of course don't have nearly as much data as PayPal being significantly newer, so it's less of a problem.

conflicts/row locks being one of the more common, but that's easy to deal with. It's when an external call to a processor dies halfway through that things get tricky.
The Myth of Start Up Costs
It's just as well. I personally know that one of the companies on the list is profitable, while it says it's not. (That's not to say it's "earned a good return for its investors, blah blah blah, just that it isn't having to draw down its capital.) The only link it gives as a source is to a page on the website that says absolutely nothing about whether it's profitable.
I saved a link to my pinboard a while back about a couple who sold all their possessions and took a VW van through North/Central/South America and in and around Africa. Super interesting read: http://www.vwvagabonds.com/
I think most people doubt that depression is caused by a single biological mechanism and is most likely a holistic/dynamic problem. I think that's why some doubt the value of pursueing such reductionist hypothesis of depression.
Might be worth going commercial with this, there are already some good well-developed devices for environmental monitoring.

I'm a fan of the WeatherGoose / MiniGoose / WatchDog:
http://www.itwatchdogs.com/product-detail-weathergoose_ii-1....

Can email, send SNMP traps, expand to multiple sensors easily, &c.
I just finished living the van life while running a company for two months. My goal was to wake up with a new view (and sunrise if I was ambitious) every morning and there are some fantastic ones in the SF Bay Area. (Little secret: the parking lot next to Chrissy Field is wide open and gets epic sunrises over Alcatraz.) It becomes naturally easy to go for a morning swim or hike before work. At least in San Francisco, there are a lot of people living out of RVs and vans and you start to follow their lead and find the good places to park. I bought a cargo van from an electrician and built a full size bed that converts into a seat and some shelves for my stuff. Coincidentally, I just put my van up for sale on craigslist yesterday, so if anyone wants to carry the torch, hit me up!

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/cto/3316494260.html
I agree... this is going to have huge "star of Bethlehem", "Second coming", and "we were off by a year on Mayan calendar" connotations. The timing is just too perfect.

So... who's going to start a company to take advantage of this?
I would guess the same as any other library. If it doesn't support AMD, shim it?
http://requirejs.org/docs/api.html#config-shim

I can go into specifics if you give an example of the dependency structure you're trying to define. But the basic case I suppose would just be to shim foundation.min.js to depend on jquery.
Most of the people I know who have Android phones don't care what version of the OS they're running. In fact, the UI changed so much between Donut and ICS, they might prefer their phones not to be updated.

The amount that people in our circles care about phone software is much, much higher than most people who go into Verizon every two years to get a new handset with a fresh battery.
Apple doing fine a year after Jobs' death
Big Data: All Aboard the Information Bus
If you think you can handle some sweaty palms, Alex Honnold, one of the best free solo climbers in the world, lives in his van so he can easily get from park to park and seems to absolutely thrive off the lifestyle -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR1jwwagtaQ

There is something that appeals to my personality to live out of a van and just move on a whim but I don't think I would ever have the guts to go for it.
I guess the "expected solution" would be that you can install the desktop client on a new computer, log in to your account and start syncing from anywhere in the world.
Hot Or Not BET Hip Hop Awards 2012
Another classic is his article on solving sudoku puzzles.

http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

Though languages with constraint systems built in have even nicer solutions (e.g. Oz)
When talking with a lamborghini dealer, I was informed that some exceptionally rich people will purchase one of those, keep it for 3 years, and then sell it back at a profit because they depreciate so slowly. I thought this was interesting.
That's fine, but I don't recall seeing any of the recent Jobs anniversary posts worded in the present tense. The title is just confusing. I was well aware of it at the time, but I had to think for a second because something in my brain was telling me that someone else had died, since Ritchie had passed away a year ago. I feared for Ken Thompson for a moment there.

[Edit: the date was not in the title originally as it is now.]
Past tense because I no longer sell static analysis software.
Yes, but all of these changes didn't just happen because people were posting displeasure on reddit. There were nationwide movements. Where's our movements now? We have some, and what happens to them?

I don't dispute for a second that we are better off today than ever before. I just wonder if we've peaked...
beware registration wall
Yes the article says so, but I really don't believe that it's correct. The comet will at its closest be around 60,000,000 km away from the earth, that is more than 150 times further away than the moon, and almost halfway to the sun.

What could possibly make the comet, which is very, very small compared to the moon, be that bright? I think the journalist have misunderstood the calculation or maybe read ~16 (approximately, which has been the current magnitude) as -16.

From nasa.gov:
"In the best case, the comet is big, bright, and skirts the sun next November. It would be extremely bright -- negative magnitudes maybe -- and naked-eye visible for observers in the Northern Hemisphere for at least a couple of months."

If NASA says it _might_ reach negative magnitudes, I'm pretty sure the -16 is wrong.
FYI the Greeks didn't have negative numbers. Philosophers were still arguing whether zero could truly be a number (there wasn't really a need for zero as a placeholder regardless, Greek numerals don't have a positional aspect).

Source: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Greek_numbers...
Fully functional Android phone embedded in Entertainment Weekly
My favorite "living in a van" story is http://www.hobostripper.com/

(I wonder how much worse a van is than a military trailer. Those range from 40x12 with private bathroom and nice furnishings down to 10x8 with a roommate and no bathroom. It's probably a lot easier due to everyone else around you doing exactly the same thing, and there being portapotties, shower trailers, etc. freely available.)

I lived in a car for a month or so around the Bay Area (mostly because it was easier than finding an apartment); I'd do a hotel once or twice a week (and stay from 6am one day to 4pm the next day), and a 24h fitness membership (showers, etc. nationally) is $10-12.50/mo through Costco. I really wouldn't recommend car living, though.
Foundation's mobile grid utility classes (class="nine mobile-three columns") and source ordering are really nice. And even though BS buttons are prettier, the gradients make a quick color change very challenging!
It can go horribly wrong: http://www.ted.com/talks/becky_blanton_the_year_i_was_homele...
Cloning a fertile mouse
I haven't observed any correlation between being nervous and underperforming in answering technical questions. How do people get through math exams in college? If anything, I'd expect answers to non-technical questions to be far more influenced by the artificiality and unfamiliarity of the interview situation, being judged by a stranger, high-stakes, and everything.
One thing the Thinkpads do right, by me, is the keyboard, which I'm surprised no one here has mentioned. They have just the right depth of stroke, and the backing tends to be very solid to minimize flex. One thing that I wish most manufacturers would understand is that specs matter much less than the user interface. And for geeks, the UI is typically the keyboard, the display, and to a lesser extent the mouse (since the OS can be tweaked to the user's liking). Get these things right, and I don't care if it has a PIII in it, I'll use it.